Mitochondrial research will cost lives says pro-life group SPUC

London, 28 June 2013: Mitochondrial research will cost lives, said the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) www.spuc.org.uk the UK’s largest and oldest pro-life group today.

SPUC was responding to today’s announcement by Professor Dame Sally Davies, the government’s chief medical officer that the government intends to bring forth draft regulations to allow the abnormal creation of human embryos in order to address mitochondrial diseases. In a statement, Dame Sally described the research as “life-saving treatment”.

A spokesman for SPUC responded: “In fact, the vast majority of embryonic children created in the laboratory are killed because they do not meet the ‘quality control’ requirements dictated by scientists involved in such increasingly macabre experiments. Also, over the past 20 years, proponents of human embryo experimentation have repeatedly claimed that such research offered the promise – and perhaps the only hope – of finding treatments for serious diseases. The public has been repeatedly misled. It is the biotech industry’s excuse to create a genetically manipulated baby.”